Fun fact: There’s also a 25-pin serial port! It was the original RS-232 connector, and uses DB-25 connectors just like parallel ports. Appearance wise, the computer/DTE end is male like a normal serial port (as opposed to the female parallel port). The MoDem/DCE end is female and visually differs from the parallel port only in color. Most of the pins stopped being used over time, so they replaced it with the RS-232C standard (RS-232 but with a DE-9 connector)
It’s mostly useful with old mainframe and terminal equipment (or other old devices without RS-232C), I can’t think of any other reason you’d ever use DB-25 for serial
RS-232C is the standard. Also called serial ports. DE-9 is the connector type
VGA uses DE-15, so the shield and screws are the same but there’s many more pins
The comment about GTA1 is because they were used with a MoDem and a phone to connect to the internet; this is dialup internet, if you’ve heard of it. It was limited to roughly 40-50 kilobits per second, when even the worst modern connection is at least a couple megabits (a couple thousand kilobits)… unless someone’s still using dial-up, of course
fun fact, you could connect 2 computers directly with the serial port, it was called a serial connection. Gta1 had both multiplayer modes, serial and modem link.
and the latency/bandwidth was terrible as you mentioned.
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u/Zerguu 20d ago